Colored Pencil Illustrations - Free PSD download

January 20, 2013

What originally started as an idea of an app icon, I thought these detailed colored pencil illustrations would make a great free PSD download! At the moment I'm working on improving my design skills in skeuomorphism, so this was an exercise in that and involved a lot of experimentation and trial and error. In the Photoshop file there is a blue pencil, yellow pencil and red pencil. I'm happy with the result and hope that you will be too! Below is a full sized preview of the photoshop file:

When I started creating these colored pencils I began with a vector version of the illustration that had each section of the pencil as a separate vector object. After nearly finishing the pencils I decided there had to be a better way than with all these separate parts, which was proving to be a bit of a headache. So I scrapped everything and started all over, 8-10 hours wasted, haha. No, I wouldn't say they were wasted, but just time learning :) So the second time around I made the pencil body one piece and created the 3 different sides with just one detailed gradient. This approach was a big improvement because it was simpler and the photoshop file was more organized and because I could adjust colors more quickly.

Thoughts for next time - It would be nice if next time I could make the pencil sides out of a black and white gradient overlaid on a solid color. This would make adjusting the color of the pencil much easier - say if I wanted a pink or an orange, but I'm unsure if this would produce a result of sufficient quality for all colors. Each color still needed it's own tweaks of these three - for example the blue colored pencil needed the opacity turned down on body texture layer.